Mr. Blair has a pleasing capacity to take us with him into privileged places, whether it’s upstairs at the White House (where, over dinner, he finds Mr. Bush “unbelievably, almost preternaturally calm” before his major speech to Congress after 9/11) or to Balmoral itself, where he must dash down long corridors to the toilet facilities, which are both remote and old-fashioned”” Victorian water closets. He gives a frank account of how hard it was, in his early years as prime minister, to get on with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with “hauteur.”
Not surprisingly, Mr. Blair offers a robust defense of his role in taking Britain into the Iraq war, though he agonizes over the invasion’s violent aftermath. To this day he sees the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as the one true course for his country (and ours). More surprisingly, he notes that his close relations with the U.S., despite the war’s unpopularity, gave him increased stature with other world leaders, who assumed that he had Mr. Bush’s ear.
As for the joint U.S.-British decision to seek (in vain) United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion, Mr. Blair has no apologies. He reveals that although Vice President Dick Cheney was adamantly opposed to involving the U.N., Mr. Bush did not take much persuading. In any case, the U.N. declined to authorize the use of military force, and the invasion went ahead anyway. Clearly, for Mr. Blair, it was better to have tried multilaterally and lost than never to have tried at all.
I have no plans to read Mr. Blair’s memoirs, so I will confine myself to a point discussed in the review which I find troubling. He is reported to have made disparaging comments about H.M. the Queen. There is a very long tradition in British politics that the PM’s conversations with H.M. are private and privileged. This is for important constitutional reasons. The Queen is the head of state and everything done is done in Her name. Thus she must be free to confer with and both seek and offer advice on matters of state. At the same time though, Britain is a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary supremacy firmly established. Thus the nature of the monarch’s involvement in politics has, at least since the reign of Victoria, been kept deliberately vague with successive PMs keeping their relationship with the Sovereign private.
And of course, it is simply in bad taste to criticize someone who is incapable of responding by virtue of Her office.